Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 21:29:00 07/21/00
Go up one level in this thread
On July 21, 2000 at 23:56:52, Chessfun wrote: >On July 20, 2000 at 18:05:19, Bruce Moreland wrote: >> >>Glad to see there's nothing personal going on on your end of the Bob - Tom >>equation. >> >>Bob gets credit for a lot of stuff: >> >>1) Writing Cray Blitz. Was it the best program ever written? Would it have >>performed against modern micros? Who cares! It was there, when it was there, >>it won two championships, it got into the news, it promoted its sponsor, and Bob >>gets credit for putting it all together. >> >>2) Writing Crafty. Crafty isn't the world champion, but who cares, it's >>obviously a high-end program and it's open source! It's been downloaded by a >>zillion people who either want to play against it or learn from the source, and >>thousands of people have played against it on the Internet and are playing >>against it right now. >> >>3) Being an Internet authority. He has something to say about essentially >>everything technical. He says it not to show how smart he is, or to put others >>down, but because he wants to help people solve problems and make their chess >>programs better. If you ask Bob a question you get an answer, and it's the best >>answer he can give you, and he'll do work to get you the answer. And this is >>not just a recent thing, he's been doing this since the Internet came of age and >>before. >> >>4) Researching and publishing. He's published useful articles on Cray Blitz, in >>a field where most published articles are not useful, especially early articles. >> He's also published several articles about Crafty and about general computer >>chess topics such as diminishing returns in search and parallel search. This is >>stuff that anyone can learn from and many have. Any computer chess library will >>contain articles written by Bob. >> >>The issue of who should be especially honored among members of our community >>should be many-faceted. I think that it is tempting to elevate the person who >>has won recent championships or who is on top of the SSDF list, etc. I think >>that is a ridiculously narrow view. If you look at overall sustained >>contribution, you can't possibly arrive at the conclusions you have reached. >> >>bruce > > >I just spent 30 minutes reading through this thread.....wow. > >Top marks for me go to this as usual bruce a well put post. > >Thanks. Thanks. Tom responded with the comment that none of what I says has anything to do with Bob being a "good" programmer. That's true, but there are only a few other criteria that we can use to judge who the "best" chess programmer is. 1) "Uniform" performance. Who has produced the strongest program for a given (probably common) platform? Strength can be measured by tournament results, by scientific testing, by subjective human evaluation, or perhaps by other ways. 2) "Open" performance. This is the same as the above, only you get credit for finding good hardware or getting a job and a big budget at IBM. 3) Technical code quality. This one isn't so much concerned with strength of the program as it is with how well the program works. If I something I want programmed, almost always the best programmer is the one who gets the job done with the fewest bugs in the shortest time, and performance of the final product is not the primary consideration. The first two are a little boring, and are apt to lead to pointless arguments amongst people who don't know anything, or penis-size posts from people who are obsessed about that kind of thing. The third one is not as relevant as it relates to chess programming, since people don't care about maintainability or features or product quality so much as raw strength. I chose another way of looking at it, so I could at least say something constructive and not too stupid. 4) Overall contribution to the field. We are a community. Those who just quietly win tournaments contribute something, in that others can have something to shoot for, but those who are willing to contribute meaningfully to the community are also worth of much respect. I have a hard time putting some quiet programmer who won a few tournaments five or ten years ago ahead of Bob. The topic is so bad I shouldn't have said anything, but I was goaded into it. Some people haven't figured out how little they know about things. bruce
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